Bad Customer Service

Many times I've had particularly bad experiences from the customer disservice
departments of large companies. Many people will be familiar with these
experiences in which large companies try and ignore you in the hope that
you'll go away and stop bothering them. You will usually be fobbed off by
first line customer service drones who will tell you that your problem has
been fixed, send a message to another person within the company who will then
fail to do anything. They will frequently tell you that someone will phone you
back within $time which of course they never do. In order to get things done,
you have to be rude and get through to a person who doesn't normally deal with
this stuff. Those persons are easy to identify because they don't have a
prerecorded introduction tape.

The key things that anoy me are:

Companies doing the exact opposite to what they are supposed to and acting
suprised that you're upset.

Companies with broken computer systems which acts as the scapegoat for
everything.

BT refusing to close my account

I phoned up BT asking them to close my
account and cut off my telephone on the grounds that I had moved house. I was
informed that in order to do this I would have to quote my customer service
number. This number is printed at the top of every bill. I informed them that
my telephone bills were at the bottom of an unnamed box and it would take me
some time to find them, I did not wish to do this and I wanted my phone cut
off. They refused. I then informed the company that I would write to them
instructing them to cut off my account. They informed me that they would write
back to my previous address with a form for me to fill in to request
termination. I offered never to pay them again and they informed me that they
would fine me for continued non payment before finally cutting me off some six
months later and sullying my credit rating.

The only way I was able to make the take action was by threating them with the
UK data protection act. Under this act for a small payment I can request that
any company sends me all of it's records about me - both paper, electronic and
memorised for a statutory fee - about ten or twenty pounds. Figuring this was
cheaper than six months phone service I informed BT that I intended to enact
this piece of legislation and they would be hearing from me by letter shortly
detailling this. I was immediately put through to someone senior. I repeated
to this person my desire to have every piece of data they hold about me in
order to get my customer number so I could cut off an unwanted phone line. At
this point the senior person agreed that a much better course of action was to
schedule termination for a weeks time. Write to my previous address a letter
addressed to me informing them this was going to happen and it could only be
stopped by a written response signed by me. This worked.

Natwest

A Natwest had closed my account without telling me. It suspended
my ability to take money out, but allowed me to continue blissfully paying
money into the now closed account. All this money ended up in a 'holding'
account that I was not allowed to access. It took a week of telephoning and
several visits to the bank to get this far. After discovering the bank had
lost all the original account mandates I had to go and resign all of the forms
to get the account reopened. Upon telling the Assitant Branch manager that an
opening time of 'sometime this week' was not acceptable and I wanted the
account opened today - this was two weeks after we had discovered the account
was closed - I asked him to lead me through his banks complaints procedure. I
got him to detail to me how I should pass the complaining letter I have
written from person to person to ombudsman to court of law. The account was
open two hours later.

NTL

This company double charged me a bill. Upon asking them for advice about what
to do I receive the answer 'pay it and we'll refund it off your next bill'. I
pointed out this was my final bill and refused to pay it. They told me that
the only thing I could do was to cancel my direct debit to them. This I did.
Some months later I received an extremely threatening final demand for the
tiny amount outstanding on my account. I telephone their customer service
department and stood firm, I wanted a credit for the value of this bill. I
spoke to a customer service person who kept informing me that I could be put
through since everyone else was out and the only thing I could do would be to
pay the bill. I refused, I informed her that I could not be put on hold. I
then refused to be put through to anyone else and kept making rude but non
abusive suggestions about how good her company was. Eventually she managed to
signal to get her manager to come over and her manager repeated the same until
she got fed up and wrote off my bill.

Intelligent Finance

MFI

I ordered a kitchen from MFI, I did this online to take advantage of being
able to purchase stuff without a 'free kitchen design consultation'. I used
their website and it crashed with an MSSQL deadlocked transaction error. Being
a web-developer who's used MSSQL I'm well aware about what this means,
something timed out and the site gave up. In this case it was the credit card
authorisation. As a result barclaycard authorised the transaction after the
website had given up trying to process it, result, I get charged and no record
was made of the transaction. This also had the helpful side effect of locking
me out of every dynamic page on their site until they rebooted their database
or web server two days later. This included the contact page.

After arguing at some length that I should be allowed to speak to them - there
was a great deal of
Me : Hi, I'd like a refund on my credit card for the order you don't
acknowledge
Them : What's your order number
Me : I don't have an order number. That's why I'm phoning. Your website
crashed and you took my money.
Them : I'm afraid I can't do anything without your order number as it's not
in the computer.
Me : Do I care? You took my money and I want it back. Now.
Them : I'll pass you on to another useless customer service drone who'll say the
same thing
and so on. Eventually after four customer service drones repeating the same
diaogue with me I got sarcastic which didn't help. I then contacted my credit
card company who marked the transaction as disputed so I had 28 days extra to
resolve it with MFI before I'd have to start escalating it through
barclaycard.

Returning to MFI and pointing out I'd stopped the transaction on my credit
card appeared to get me put through to a person without a prerecorded intro
who apologised to me and told me that the internet department would speak to
me shortly. I asked for a definition of shortly and the response was
approximately before the heat death of the universe. Not holding out much hope
I was pleasantly suprised to be phoned an hour later and informed I would be
getting a full refund and some compensation within two weeks. Unsuprisingly,
this was a blatant lie. Leaving them two weeks I phoned back and complained
again, again the internet department phoned me back and assured me that I
would get a full refund. Pointing out that they had already told me this
resulted in in a sheepish oh. My compensation had also disappeared. They did
manage to sucessfully credit me 9 weeks after the transaction and still have
paid me none of the promised compensation.

Dabs Direct

I shouldn't be too nasty about Dabs since in general their service is pretty
good. However they ship expensive computer goods around with no extra
packaging. As a result the expensive CD Writer I ordered just before Christmas
got 'lost'. I suspect it has something to do with placing a box marked
'Expensive CD Writer, would make an ideal Christmas Present' in the post
without the benefit of brown paper. Still they shipped out a replacement two
weeks later without complaint.

They've consistently shipped lots of other stuff since on time, so I guess
that was just a one off.

Supreme O Glaze

I sent this complaint to the Telephone Preference Service about this company.

I received three calls in quick sucessions, the first from 'Supreme
Promotions', who purported to be carrying out Market Research over which
Double Glazing offer I would find most attractive. This was followed up by a
second call from "Supreme O Glaze" offering me the offer I had just stated I
would find most attractive. They defended their call to me saying that I 'must
have not ticked a box on a bank statement recently'. I informed them that I
was TPS registered, I would be reporting them and I did not wish to hear from
them again. A minute later I received another call from 'Supreme Promotions'
attempting to carry out the same 'Market Research', I informed them I was TPS
registered and would be reporting them.

Barclaycard

Barclaycard deserve a mention only because they seem to be a uniquely helpful
company with customer service people who can make things happen. I suspect
this may be because I have never paid them any interest and they would like me
to do so. Every request I've ever made has been dealt with within 24 hours,
their advice has been useful and they are able to actually tell you things
without putting you through. When I needed to extend my credit limit for the
second time in three months for an exceptional purchase
[a thing not allowed thing according to their rules] the
person listened to my situation, asked a bunch of credit related questions,
phoned someone up and managed to get the application approved. I was amazed!

Well, it was all bound to go wrong sooner or later. Firstly they've decided I
really need a personal loan and some credit card debt because I don't have any
so they now write to me constantly encouraging me to get into debt. Then they
changed their terms and conditions so you now get fined £20 for missing
a payment in addition to paying the interest - I of course found out about this by missing a payment. As a result on the payment I missed the effective interest rate was 56%, I complained to them and they've refunded the charge, but not before I got a cashback credit card from Smile who give me more free stuff, haven't merged with Nectar and allow me to pay my full bill by direct debit.

Redbus Interhouse

As director of Mythic Beasta we've
moved to our own dedicated hosting space. We tried to buy an InterShelf from
Redbus
Interhouse. This is specified as

However, as we discovered, it's only 600mm deep, which is a big
problem if your servers are say 650mm deep, and it has no rack rails, which is
odd for a rack. We've had to upgrade to a full InterRack to get the bits we
wanted which means we've about 40U of co-lo space going - buy it here.